Help with tagging dropped items.

Im trying to make a mod that makes the survival aspect of minecraft more challenging , and part of that was going to be making food items spoil with time. The food items would be tagged when they were dropped by the mob or the crop with a number tag of the current world time and that number would then by compared with the time the item would be consumed.  The problem is that the trigger i used is 'when entity picks up item'  but after some testing it seems that there are some major blindspots, like with mobfarms that collect items on their own through hoppers. Is there a way to tag the items the moment they spawn in the world?